


Sing to Survive

by aseriesofessays



Category: The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Psychological Trauma, i havent written in whole years, is this a fix-it? maybe!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-29 18:18:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18299561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aseriesofessays/pseuds/aseriesofessays
Summary: he is very tired. he sits in his chair and sings but his vocal chords are strained and his smile is wide and fixed and. his name is paul. his name is paul and he is part of the hive and they are settled in his belly and their buzzing is soft and faint and oh, jesus, his name is paul and the hive is flickering and his name is paul and his cheeks hurt. his head droops. he's been apart from them for so long. days. weeks. he wants to go back, because even faked happiness is better than this awful emptiness, this singularity. the hive can't find him. the hive is hungry. paul, too, is hungry.he wants, he wants, he wants.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is sort of inspired by 'after the inevitable' by youneedwhat! because that fic slaps im sort of writing fanfiction for a fanfiction which is, u know, kind of a low but not really bc it's a really good fic

all empty fucking smiles and perfect harmonies. 

he still hates musicals, he guesses. the part of him that’s not humming pitch-perfect, right in the pit of his belly where he used to feel things like anxiety and happiness and fear and love. he knows that whatever kind of content placidness he feels is fake, that the wide, cheerful smile plastered on his face is rigid and false and hiding something underneath. 

he couldn’t tell you what. he’s a vague memory of himself in the corner of his own mind, huddled blindly and vacantly. he watches, a curious passenger to his own body. he doesn’t sleep. he doesn’t eat. he guesses the things don’t have to, but it’s still a jolt of frantic fear when he realizes it’s been ages- months, maybe?- of singing with the hive, dancing with the hive, living and breathing in perfect, beautiful synchrony. it’s the sharpest thing he’s felt in months and it’s crushed before he can even really experience it. not that he cares much, anyways. 

\--

the hive feeds when new people are incorporated, but they're running out. 

they all know that, because they're the hive, and the queen has thoughts and so they have thoughts, and the queen knows that She is hungry. he is hungry, too, but She is hungry and so he must feed Her. 

(that knowledge, almost heavenly, a staple of his new world and new life, had been bestowed upon him when he'd somehow survived that grenade blast and woken up blue. he lives for the hive and the hive lives for Her, and She is hungry. and he knows, too, that the hive has swept countless planets, a plague of locusts, collecting... whatever they collect. people. souls. songs.)

they're running out of people, anyways, even as they overflow hatchetfield and clivesdale and all those other tiny, run down little towns. the hive doesn't need to sleep and they don't need to eat and their camp-city is ringing with homages to Her, and they are running out of people and She is hungry and they are starving. groups- whole choruses at first but then chamber choirs and quartets and finally solo members- venture out, sweeping the streets, finding survivors and touching them with blue sunshine. 

he will do his part for the hive, of course he will. he leaves the camp-city, legs pumping, tapping, settled down in the little corner of his brain. 

\--

there is a girl.

he is singing. he is always singing but he is singing when he sees her and then suddenly he's not, he doesn't know why, and he remembers her, sort of (emma im sorry), and his smile is bright and fixed and she hits him over the head so fucking hard he swears he hears a gong ring. like a shitty cartoon, from when he watched shitty cartoons and didn't fucking sing. 

when he wakes up he's tied to a chair and he's singing again. the girl doesn't seem moved. 

\--

his days go like this: he doesn't sleep. he breathes in big, deep gulps. his mouth is very dry but he is not thirsty. he sings. the girl (emma you lost) talks to him, mindlessly- although she never lets slide where they are or why she's dressed in all black, a utility belt slung around her waist, a gun at her hip. he notes this in that dusty corner of his mind where he sits, slumped, bored, quiet. 

she calls him paul. she offers him food but he is not hungry. the hive doesn't know where he is and they buzz, softly, at the pit of his belly.

he is very tired. he sits in his chair and sings but his vocal chords are strained and his smile is wide and fixed and. his name is paul. his name is paul and he is part of the hive and they are settled in his belly and their buzzing is soft and faint and oh, jesus, his name is paul and the hive is flickering and his name is paul and his cheeks hurt. his head droops. he's been apart from them for so long. days. weeks. he wants to go back, because even faked happiness is better than this awful emptiness, this singularity. the hive can't find him. the hive is hungry. paul, too, is hungry. 

he wants, he wants, he wants. 

\--

his name is paul. he tries to sing but he can't think of any words, and his mouth is dry, anyway. he sleeps and screams himself awake and the girl- emma, the barista, he wanted to kiss her but she was dying- is there, standing in the corner of the room, watching him with her dark eyes. 

"you're awake," she says, wary and a little bit cool. "i thought you guys couldn't sleep. we thought you'd died." she considers him, flashes a grin that poorly hides whatever she's feeling. paul can't parse it out, anyway, so her secrets are safe for now. "well, more than you're, like, already dead." 

paul opens his mouth, blinks sandpaper eyes, drags dry tongue over dry teeth. "i want to go home," he rasps. her fingers twitch for her gun, her eyebrows shoot up, her jaw clenches. 

"i'm not gonna fall for that shit, paul," she snaps, suddenly venomous. "you can't fucking- i believed you once, asshole, and the only reason i'm not shooting you right between the eyes is because you're an experiment. isolation from the hive and its effects on the host, or whatever." she- emma- swallows, heavily, adds a soft, "i know you're not paul anymore." he hardly hears her. his eyes close, his head dips, fringe falling in his face. it's crusted with something, stiff with it- blood? vomit? drool? 

"emma," he mumbles, licking cracked lips. "emma, i want to home, emma, please take me back to the hive." paul feels sick. dizzy. the room he's in is small and cold and his chair is shoved way back in a corner, and he feels suddenly sick and claustrophobic. his eyes fill up, suddenly, and he thinks that probably at some point he'd've been embarrassed to cry in front of emma, but right now he feels fucking. lost. his brain is a huge, roomy space, his singularity fills up his chest like a vacuum, contradicting in its lonely loudness. when he sleeps he dreams of singing. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the feeling im trying to portray here is when paul is stuck in the center of the circle with the greenpeace girl in the first song and hes trying to crawl out but he keeps bumping into the sides and eventually he just is like ok! ok ill just sit here then! or his face when he goes to the coffee shop and hes like hello and emma comes out singing 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2MwJXYwuo8 actually here is the mood im trying to portray '''are you frightened yet''' i dont know paul are u

paul sits alone in his little room in his little chair for the most part. his head pounds, softly, rhythmically, but the sweet steady beat of it is less of a comfort than a reminder of what he'd lost, or what he'd hated, or. something. his head aches in 6/8 time. his teeth chatter like tap-dancing shoes. 

it's a while before he becomes vaguely aware of a feeling growing in his belly- fiery, almost, painful and cramping. it takes him a while to place it but when he does- oh, right, hunger, he used to get hungry and thirsty and he used to sleep and love- he laughs until he cries. they come in, people with hard voices and soft hands, and he doesn't fight their hands but he doesn't answer their questions either because what right do they have to break his solitude, what right do they have to come to him and pretend to be harmless when they are the ones who cut off his limbs and boiled his brain? 

"paul." 

her voice, whip-sharp, cracks across the room. he feels it like a brand across his face and he looks up, dully, through the people standing in front of him. if he is burning then she is a fucking glacier, icy in the face of the heat cramping and burning his throat and forehead. 

his muscles loosen, all at once, and emma clears the room with a ruthless sort of efficiency that he doesn't remember and can't ask about. 

"what the hell is wrong with you?" that voice again- oh, he remembers. a man has to draw a line in the sand, he'd said, and she'd laughed, and she'd been frightened but not as much as she is now. he thinks the old him- the new-old him, the blue one (maybe it wasn't him at all) would have jumped on it. paul just wants- 

to hide. he thinks. but he thinks he wants to hide with her. take them both to some secret cave where it's dark and his head doesn't pound and she can whisper about backpacking wherever it was- guatemala?- and her sister and her pot farm she wants to start. the memories aren't painful, somehow, and he could cry with relief at how good it feels to be hollowed out and shattered and pieced back together messily with scotchtape but not, for once, hurting. 

he licks dry lips with dry tongue. "oh, emma," he says, voice the barest rasp. he's thirsty. for a while he's been thirsty but he hadn't remembered how that tasted, sticky and sour in his mouth. it twists with his hunger, and they lick together behind his eyeballs. "i'm-" starving. terrified. elated. about to pass out from the exertion (of just being awake, he guesses. he hadn't jogged or anything before this but he thinks that maybe, if he survives and if he can go outside this little room without a complete breakdown, he'll take it up). "i missed you." 

her mouth does something funny- a twitch, like a smile but like she's trying to hold back tears. her chin is trembling. he forces himself to meet her eyes, bright with tears and steely. "they think they starved it out of you," she tells him. soft. not friendly but not the outright animosity from at first. his laugh cracks his lips and sends a drop of blood running hot down his chin. his belly is still and silent and he cannot hear a thing besides emma's harsh breathing. 

"i'm all alone in my head," he says, and it's tinged with panic (because he's afraid, he is, he's terrified by this seclusion) but it tastes good coming from his lips. it tastes right, and it makes emma smile, and he closes his eyes and goes to sleep. 

\--

he wakes up screaming, and when he leans over to vomit over the side of his bed (oh jesus fucking christ he's in a bed what the fuck happened to his nice little chair in his nice little room) he tugs out an IV in his arm, which fucking _hurts_ , and when he's finally finished up with his hysterics and is huddled, sweating and shivering, in the corner of the clean, spacious, unfortunately bright room, a fucking herd of people (some with guns, which really, really doesn't help) storms in, and by the time they've lifted him bodily back into the bed and jabbed the needle back into his arm he's thoroughly spooked. he wants to go back to his room, or he wants emma, or he wants both, or or or. 

and then she's there, looking distinctly uncomfortable, her hair a frizzing mess, and seeing her is sweet and cool as fresh water sliding down his throat. 

they watch each other for a long moment, paul's breathing still unsteady, and he uses the moment of stillness (it's always so still and calm around emma, paradise in a desert, the mirage he's been chasing) to take stock. 

someone's bathed him, which should be embarrassing but is a relief. his hair falls soft in his eyes, and he feels scrubbed new, and he still feels sick and as weak as a fucking baby and his head spins gently but he is alive, and his thoughts are clearer than they've been in a long time, and emma is here. 

he searches for something witty to say, settles somewhat blandly on "guess we didn't die in fucking clivesdale, thank fuck," and emma's laugh is as far from musical as it can get, teary and a little snotty sounding, and paul couldn't be more thankful for it. 

\--

and he's not okay. he's not. he flinches when people touch him and his jaw aches when he tentatively tries solid food because it's been so long since he'd needed to eat, and the first time he'd heard someone humming absently to a song he- well. he's not quite okay. but emma holds his hand, and he holds hers, and they push on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah i definitely didnt intend to finish this but..... schwoopsy :)
> 
> OK edit the next day like........ i rlly didnt intent 2 finish it lmao do yall think i should keep this or delete this chapter/the end of this chapter and keep writing idk......... sound off........ in the comments or u can send an ask 2 my tumblr at macroglossus.tumblr.com 
> 
> like idk if anyone cares but LIKE

**Author's Note:**

> im probably going to add more chapters to this because even though i don't write very often anymore this fic is like. chewing at my bones 
> 
> follow my tumblr @macroglossus.tumblr.com 
> 
> ((this is like the first het ship ive ever shipped also like... im new 2 this))


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